On the Shores of the Mediterranean

On the Way to the Balkans

One of the problems about travelling round the Mediterranean under your own steam and not as part of a group is the cost of transportation. Luckily, by one of those miracles to which we fortunately are no strangers, we were offered a trip back to Venice, which we had so capriciously abandoned because it was foggy, on the inaugural run of the Venice – Simplon – Orient Express.

The scenes at Victoria before this inaugural train was hauled away by a humdrum British diesel (it had not been possible to use steam engines on any sections of the route because of lack of steam train facilities) were memorable for anyone interested in such trivia, which included us. For the first time for many a day the rich, or those making a stab at being thought to be so, like ourselves, could be seen travelling together and the station was awash with what Veblen described in his Theory of the Leisure Class as ‘conspicuous consumption’.

It had been suggested that we come dressed in the manner of the thirties and as a result pre-1939 taxis and motor cars of the same period hired from specialist hire firms were rolling up, one of them a mauve Panther which to my untutored eye looked like an overblown Bugatti. These disgorged a merry throng: gentlemen in wing collars and Panama hats, ladies in white felt and pill-box hats, and yards of beads. Liza Minnelli arrived bowler-hatless in non-period black, which suited her. Denise, Lady Kilmarnock, a partner in the firm which was promoting all this, was splendid in a shocking pink turban and was the life and soul of the party. I had a new shirt for the occasion. My wife had a new white beret. Nigel Dempster, gossip columnist of the Daily Mail, also had a new shirt. Calmest of all was Jennifer, society columnist of Harpers and Queen. The best organized of all the recorders of this and succeeding scenes, she had done her homework on her fellow travellers. She had no need to go scurrying around finding out who was who. Meanwhile the Coldstream Guards’ band played away like anything.

At 11.44 on the dot, having settled into a coach called Zena, used on the Bournemouth Belle from 1929 to 1946, we pulled out to the accompaniment of an enormous fanfare of trumpets. The interior was exquisite, the result of taking the whole thing to pieces and rebuilding it (in Lancashire) and the work of such people as cabinet-makers skilled in marquetry, and upholsterers.

Soon we were tucking into a delicious collation: watercress soup; salmon with tarragon cream, carrot and fennel; iceberg and mint leaf salad; tomatoes stuffed with mushrooms; and ‘Henley Pudding’, sort of mousse; with the glasses and cutlery, designed in France, which you can buy if you have enough of the necessary, setting up a magic tinkling.

Meanwhile, we were wondering who among this glittering throng was the Duchess of Westminster, Princess Esra Jah of Hyderabad, Rod Stewart, Sir Peter and Lady Parker (head of British Rail and designated ‘Folkestone only’), the grandson of George Mortimer, inventor of the Pullman Car, and Mrs Wheeler and son, the second people to book for this trip, back in 1978, all of whom were reputed to be on the train. As a result, although I had a pre-1914 Baedeker which would have given us a blow by blow account of the route to Folkestone, there was not much chance to use it or glimpse anything more than an occasional oast-house from the window.

At 14.00 we left Folkestone (and the Parkers, who had been given a good old grilling by the press as to why Sir Peter’s British Rail trains weren’t like this one) on a Sealink ferry, preserved from the common herd in the Verandah Deck Saloon which was reserved for VSOE passengers, but not protected from the media, who had been totally pre-empted by teams of Japanese television cameramen who had recorded the journey, travelling with the train all the way to Venice on a trial run and also following it with a fleet of helicopters.

Ninety minutes later, at Boulogne, we had our first sight of the European section of the train, seventeen coaches in the dark blue and gold livery of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagon-Lits et des Grands Express Européens decorated with bronze cyphers, drawn up on the quay side. There were greetings from the Mayor, or was it the President of the Chamber of Commerce?

Eleven sleepers, each with sixteen or eighteen compartments, restaurant cars, a bar car with a grand piano in it, staff and baggage cars, had all been restored at Bremen and Slyke near Ostend with what must have been a goodly slice of the £11,000,000 it had cost to get the two trains on the rails. These sleepers were Lx, L denoting luxury, the cars associated in people’s minds with the old Simplon – Orient. They had been everywhere, on the Rome Express, the Berlin – Naples, the Aegean Express and Taurus, the Nord Express to Riga before the war. We were in Wagon-Lit 3525, built at La Rochelle in 1929, decorated by René Prou, master of wagon-lit design, stored at Lourdes during the Second World War, last used on the Simplon – Orient and Rome Expresses between 1949 and 1961. Our luggage, which we hadn’t seen since Victoria, was already in the compartment. At 17.44, to the accompaniment of a band of serenading musicians, the train pulled out for Paris.

Changing for dinner in Lx 3525 – the decree was that ladies would dress and dinner jackets would be worn – was a feat of acrobatics, like the Marx Brothers in the cabin scene on the Atlantic liner (some of these compartments got smaller during conversion) and I got the bottom fly button of my trousers done up through the top buttonhole.

Down in the bar car it was like an Arabian night; everyone was dressed to the nines, with feathers and bandeaux. The champagne was flowing from those expensive Indian-club-shaped bottles. There we met an American husband and wife who owned their own parlour and sleeping cars back home in California where they hitched them on to trains and rode out to Kentucky or wherever the spirit moved them.

Dinner, which cost £20 ($28) a head (lunch and drinks on the train in England were included in the fare), was served while we were in the outskirts of Paris. It was cooked and presented by the chef, Michel Ranvier, late of the three-stars-in-Michelin Troisgros restaurant at Roanne. Memorable was the Foie Gras de Canard Entier Cuit Tout Naturelle, the little lobsters served à Vinaigrette d’Huile d’Olive, and the Jambonnette de Poulette au Vin Jaune et Morilles.

It took hours, due to one of the gas stoves in a kitchen going wrong, but who cared, we were not going on anywhere afterwards.

There was a red carpet down at the Gare d’Austerlitz, but no nobs to see us off, the present administrators of the country disapproving of conspicuous consumption and no one else wanting to be associated with the venture.

Then on through the night with a pianist, Monsieur Dars, at the grand piano in the bar, belting Scott Joplin and such as we roared down the line to Switzerland. The piano was such an impediment to navigation that sometimes I wished we’d brought a chain saw with us.

At 04.22 we arrived at Vallorbe, 266 miles from Paris, a station in the strange no-man’s-land between France and Switzerland, where as always a man plodded past groaning ‘VALLORBE … VALLORBE’, while another tapped the axles with a hammer, as in Anna Karenina.

I was asleep when they put the croissants on the train at Lausanne at 05.21, all the way along the shores of Lake Geneva and all the way up the Rhone Valley; waking in the entrance to the Simplon tunnel for the 12½-mile run under the Lepontine Alps, between Monte Leone and the Helsenhorn, where the previous week one of the Japanese camera crew had been nearly decapitated, putting his head out of the window in the middle of it.

We ate the croissants and drank coffee running along the shores of Lago Maggiore. Cork and cedar trees rose above the early mist on the Borromean Islands and the place names on the map – Stresa and Locarno – were those of long-forgotten treaties made before the war. It was going to be a lovely day. At Milan, at 10.00, the papers came on board with pictures of a frigate burning in the Falkland Islands.

Lunch on the train, £15 ($21) a head if you had to pay for it, was tagliatelle with butter, small chickens in a delicious sauce, smoked salmon, Parma ham, strawberry tart, the most delicious lemon cake and more of the Laurent-Perrier champagne on which everyone had been over-indulging themselves. Then, three hours out of Milan, we rumbled through the hideous environs of Mestre and out along the causeway to the beautiful, sinking, stinking city in the Lagoon.

We arrived at Santa Lucia Station at 14.44 to be greeted on the platform when we descended by the station master, the massed concierges of the Cipriani, the Gritti and the Danieli, the assembled staff of the Venice – Simplon – Orient Express and the Gondolieri Chorus.

Miss Minnelli left in another little black number decorated with bugle beads. She told me she had enjoyed the trip. We never saw her again. Boats took us away up the Grand Canal, a vision in the sunshine, to stay at the Cipriani for free. It was all over.

Leaving Venice some considerable time later, this time in a van by the causeway across the Lagoon, turning right at Mestre on the old main road to Trieste, we crossed the plains of the Veneto and Venezia Giulia. For much of the way the road, as are most of the other main roads in northern Italy, is lined with developments, factories and furniture showrooms mostly, whose owners now choose what were previously remote rural locations for them, so that for long periods of time it is impossible to see the country on either side at all.

It is country which when one can see it is of endless flatness, through which the irrigation ditches stretch away to what seems like infinity between the high embankments, just as they do in the Po Delta. In summer, in the heat of the day, when the mirage is operating, this country sometimes looks more like a jelly than terra firma. In it, in summer, the farmhouses and villages stand like islands isolated in seas of ripening corn and grapes. (In winter they stand in seas of freezing mud.) In autumn, in late September or October, the contadini in their wide-brimmed straw hats, at this season engaged in the vendemmia, take shelter beneath the vines, around half past nine or so, by which time it is already hot, to eat their merenda, just as we do in the vineyards around I Castagni.

The rivers that flow down through the plain from the Alps into the lagoons and marshes that fringe the coast are the Piave, the Tagliamento and the Isonzo, which first sees the light of day as the Soča, bubbling up over clean sand in a deep cleft in the rock in the Julian Alps in Yugoslavia, each of them in full, sometimes dangerous, flood in spring when the mountain snows melt. In the hot weather long reaches of them are often nothing more than arid wildernesses of shingle with a few livid green stagnant pools among them. Rivers that were practically unheard-of in the outside world until the First World War when hundreds of thousands of Italians and Austro-Hungarians died fighting one another on their banks.

Having crossed the Isonzo, the most eastward of these rivers, we arrived in the late afternoon in Monfalcone, a rather sad shipbuilding and industrial town on the shores of the Gulf of Panzano, an inlet at the head of the Gulf of Trieste, sad-looking because it was more or less destroyed in the First World War and then rebuilt in the early twenties at a time when domestic as well as public architecture was rather sad anyway.

The only old building of note is the castle, and even that is not exciting as castles go, although the view from it is magnificent, over what is actually only a small part of the vast plain which extends uninterruptedly for some 300 miles from the Julian Alps to the Maritime and the Cottian Alps in which the Po rises on the French frontier beyond Turin, with the shining lagoons reaching into it from the sea and with towers and campanili rising into the air above it, of which that of the cathedral of Aquileia, the Roman city sacked by Attila, is the most easily identifiable.

The castle stands on the very edge of what the Italians call Il Carso, the Yugoslavs call the Kras and German-speakers the Karst, a wilderness of limestone here rising in a steep escarpment abruptly above the town and the plain, like a whale surfacing from the depths of the ocean, scarred by quarrying, utterly bare except for a few plantations of conifers and innumerable electric pylons which protrude from it like harpoons. Having fought and negotiated so ferociously either to obtain or retain it, it would be comical, if it was not tragic, to see how the Italians have treated what they are always going on about as their patrimony.

Much of the Carso is bare rock, but parts of it are covered with ash, rowan, hawthorn shrubs and holm oaks, the last vestigial remains of the primeval forest that provided some of the wooden piles on which, miraculously, Venice still stands, although now plantations of conifers are rapidly changing its appearance.

Here, among what in some places look like torrents of rock, the making of the fields, before the coming of the bulldozer, was the back-breaking work of generations of men and women and their children. Here, you can still see piles of pale, rain-washed stones, as much as ten feet high and sixty feet long, like great burial cairns, all hand-picked from this wilderness to make a field of red earth perhaps three feet deep and thirty yards long in which vines, corn, turnips or potatoes could be grown.

It is a place of extremes. In winter the fearful wind called by the Slovenes the Kraška Burja, by the Italians the Bora, sweeps over the plateau from the north-east, sometimes attaining a velocity of up to 130 mph and in the past upsetting heavily laden ox-carts and even halting trains on the railway line from Trieste to Ljubljana, although it now rarely blows with such ferocity, possibly because the plateau is being protected by the reafforestation.

The early part of the year is particularly beautiful. The grass is fresh and green and carpeted with snowdrops, daffodils and lilies of the valley, and the hillsides are covered with narcissus.

In summer a huge, brooding silence envelops the Carso, a silence accentuated by the endless shrilling of cicadas that seems eventually to become part of the silence itself. The woods have a sinister, claustrophobic feeling about them and one has the sensation of being watched, and one is being watched anywhere close to the Yugoslav – Italian frontier, across which, walking in the woods, it is easy to stray.

Here in the Carso, ten minutes after the most violent rainstorm, there is no water to be seen; it has all gurgled away through fissures in the rock. For the Kras is hollow. Beneath it there is a whole subterranean world, only a minute part of it explored, of vast caverns, dark, secret rivers and black, icy lakes. From the air it looks as if it has been subjected to intense artillery bombardment, as it was when it was a major battlefield in the First World War. Its entire surface is pitted with craters but these are natural phenomena. The largest are called, in Slovene, kolisevke, basins with vertical sides as much as 300 feet deep and a quarter of a mile wide, huge caves whose roofs have collapsed. A smaller variety, doline, are blocked-up swallow holes that once led underground, funnel-shaped depressions anything from six to sixty feet deep and up to three hundred feet in diameter which contain the best earth and are cultivated as sunken fields.

One of the principal rivers is the Reka, which, as the Timavo, by which name it is still known to Italians, was as famous in classical antiquity as the Nile or the Euphrates and was written about by Virgil, Martial, Ausonius, and Strabo, who said that it contained specks of gold.

At Škocjan, a village that stands on a natural bridge of rock between two precipices, the Timavo plunges beneath one of them into a cave as high as a twenty-storey building, and emerges on the other side of the village in a dolina, five hundred feet deep and a third of a mile wide, eventually to disappear from view in the Lake of the Dead, four miles under a mountain.

It has been established, by someone who dropped fluorescein into it, of which one part can be detected in up to twenty million times its volume in water, that the Timavo then flows into the subterranean Lake of Trebiciano, which is at the bottom of a thousand-foot shaft in what is a sort of no-man’s-land beyond the municipal rubbish tips of Trieste, on its way to enter the Adriatic near Monfalcone twelve miles away, in Italy at San Giovanni Timavo. There it emerges from the base of a cliff in an arcadian place which remains arcadian only because it is the property of the Trieste waterworks, beside a church built on the site of a Roman temple itself built to hallow the spot. After its twenty-mile journey underground, it bubbles up in a series of pools, partly hidden from view by the willows that bend over them, before flowing over a series of weirs into the sea in the Gulf of Panzano, where its mouth is now disfigured by an enormous marina. Here, the Argonauts are supposed to have landed. Here, though strictly forbidden, because it belongs to the waterworks, we had a lovely picnic on the grass.

Down below in the caverns of the Carso there are strange creatures: Troglocaris Schmidti, a cave crab with a round belly which swims canted over to one side as though its ballast has shifted, and which sometimes, if it takes a wrong turning, gets sucked up into the Yugoslav drinking-water system; and, most remarkable of all, Proteus anguineus, a weird, stick-like member of the salamander family with four legs, that somehow survived the ice age in the temperate cavern air. Amphibious, breathing either through lungs or gills, according to which element it is in, quite blind, although born with embryonic eyes that later disappear, in its native habitat it lives for fifty years, and in captivity enjoys a diet of worms and mince meat. There is also a variety of blind spiders, scorpions and centipedes, all said to be either light brown or to have no colour at all.

The plateau of the eastern Kras through which the Timavo flows, mostly underground, was and is still the birthplace of some of the finest horses the world has ever seen. The rough ground and the excellent grass which grows on it combine to produce a race of horses of exceptional strength and speed with thick shanks, supple knees and particularly well-formed, strong hoofs.

Here, the ancient Greeks, and later the Romans, bred their horses for war and the great chariot races. In the oak woods near Škocjan the Thracians erected a temple to Dionysus, protector of horses. At Lipiča, among the same sort of oak woods only a few miles away, there is a mews and stud founded in 1580 by the Archduke Charles, brother of the Emperor Maximilian II. He introduced the Spanish horse into Austria and for 339 years, until the end of the Empire in 1919, horses from Lipiča were supplied to the Imperial Spanish Riding School at Vienna, the only great riding school to survive both the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars: and for more than 240 years this breed of white horses, sired by Arab-Berbers brought from Andalucia, horses from Polesine in the Po Valley and, in the eighteenth century, from Germany and Denmark, performed the evolutions of the haute école in the great white baroque Winter Riding School in the Josefs-Platz, more like a ballroom than a manège, that is the masterpiece of the architect Fischer von Erlach.

These are the horses, Lipizzas, or Lippizaners, white as marble when grown, compact, broad-chested, with thick necks, long backs, thick, long manes, and with protuberant and intelligent eyes – fully grown they are between fifteen and sixteen hands – that when you see them moving with a high knee action in a natural, spirited trot, which at Vienna would be later schooled into what is known as the Spanish Walk, remind you of the horses on a Greek urn, or else of Verrocchio’s statue of the horse being ridden by the condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni in Campo SS Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, next door to the little restaurant, the Bandierette, where we had our dinner before leaving for London on the Simplon Express.

The stallions at Lipiča are descended from one of six hereditary branches of the male line: Pluto, descended from the Danish stallion born in 1765; Conversano, from the brown Napolitan born in 1767; Napolitano, from a bay of that name born in 1790; Favory, a dun Lipiča born at Kladrub, another imperial stud between Prague and Brunn, in 1779; Maestoso, a grey born in 1819 at Mezohëgyes in Hungary of a Spanish dam sired by a Lipiča; and Siglavy, a grey Arab born in 1810, also at Mezohëgyes. Originally there were eighteen dynasties of dams at Lipiča. Several are now extinct. At Lipiča a horse takes its name from his forefather, followed by that of its dam – Siglavy-Almerina, Pluto-Theodorasta, and so on.